The resistance is global… a trans-pacific collaboration has brought this
web site into existence. Thats how The first entry on an Indymedia
website began on November 24, 1999. Indymedia went online a few days
before the protests against the WTO (world-trade-organisation) meeting
in Seattle, and it was to be the alternative platform for reports on
these protests. A group of activist-journalists set up a newsroom in a
donated storefront. They called it the Seattle Independent Media Center
(IMC). The Seattle IMC was stocked with donated computers for uploading
and editing video and for writing articles. This content would then be
posted to a website, indymedia.org. The Indymedia website clocked in 1.5
million unique visitors in its first week of operation, surpassing
traffic to CNN’s website during the Seattle protests.
The success of the Indymedia website and the Seattle IMC newsroom
behind it soon inspired the formation of local IMCs and websites in
other cities around the world, where they duplicated the publishing
platform developed for Seattle. By 2004, there were over 150
autonomously operated IMCs in some fifty countries across the globe,
which all ran websites that branched off the mothership: indymedia.org.
What started in Seattle grew into a network.
But indymedia was also always facing repressions since the very
beginning. Just last weekend a demonstration in Leipzig took place in
Solidarity to linksunten.indymedia.org. The internet platform was banned in 2017 after the protest in G20 summit in Hamburg. One of the trials connected with indymedia linksunten starts in Leipzig this week.
MUSIC:
Infernal Noise Brigade